Blog scrubbing: Exploring triggers that change privacy rules

An increasing number of individuals of all ages maintain important interpersonal relationships through blogs. Wide variation exists in how people disclose and manage their privacy on these blogs, particularly concerning the choices made about leaving information permanently visible on blogs or retrieving it sometime after an initial posting. This study applies Communication Privacy Management (CPM) theory to explore the process of privacy rule adaptation for blogging by examining situations that have triggered bloggers to change their privacy rules to enact blog post deletion practices (“blog scrubbing”). Overall, open-ended responses from 356 bloggers were content analyzed. Chi-square analysis revealed differences in the frequency of triggers that changed the blogging post privacy rules and the proactive versus reactive nature of blogging privacy management deletion practices. Bloggers’ critical incidents that activate privacy rule changes demonstrate that impression management triggers, personal safety identity triggers, relational triggers, and legal/disciplinary triggers resulted in greater alteration of individual privacy rules used to protect these bloggers from the privileged online community of individuals granted access to an individual’s blog. Thus, bloggers essentially “scrubbed” their blog site and adapted their typical privacy rules with new ones that better protected them from the online community regarding that particular blogged information.     

Prompting authentic blogging practice in an online graduate course

Blogging is characterized by an individual exploration of ideas of personal interest through frequent online posts, documenting ideas as they emerge over time. Community emerges as bloggers read and link across blogs, based on shared interests. Blogs have gained acceptance in higher education for a variety of instructional activities, among which, reflective journal writing is popular. In this study, we examine a project in which blogs were implemented within an online graduate course in order to create opportunities for students to reflect on their academic, professional and personal interests, with the goal of establishing consistent blogging that exhibits the timely, frequent and interest-driven practices of blogging practices outside educational contexts. Students enrolled in an online graduate course maintained individual blogs in which they were prompted to write about their interests and experiences as graduate students. Through an analysis of the patterns of prompt use and blog content, as well as data from a post-course survey and an online discussion, we explore how to support student engagement with blogging practice within an educational setting. Findings suggest that frequency of writing, topic resonance with the students own interests, and the timeliness of entries were key factors in scaffolding writing that aligns with blogging practice. By focusing on writing as characterized by authentic blogging practice, this study contributes to an understanding of how to harness the unique communicative elements of the blog in post-secondary settings.     

Blogging for ICT4D: reflecting and engaging with peers to build development discourse

Information and Communication Technology‐enabled Development (ICT4D) discourse relies upon the idea that ICTs can foster development in particular by encouraging wider participation in development initiatives. In this paper, we question how the blogging practices of development professionals shape such ICT4D discourse. Through a combination of interviews and analyses of blog contents, we examine two major purposes of blogging: reflecting upon development practices and engaging with a self‐selected audience. Our analyses reveal that these two purposes were interwoven in ways that contributed to making bloggers' ICT4D discourse innovative but oriented towards a small community of peers rather than a larger audience. Through blogging, development professionals refined their expertise on ICT4D. As they did so, they also generated a personal speaker's corner that primarily attracted like‐minded peers rather than promoting larger participation in ICT4D discourse. This research contributes to the emerging literature on social media practices by showing how blogging practices enable the formation of what a discourse is about, and by highlighting differences between perceived and actual levels of interactions between bloggers and their audience. The paper also adds to the ICT and development literatures by revealing that blogging practices can deepen ICT4D discourse, but that they do not necessarily enhance participation in development. Such insight is crucial for development professionals to develop realistic expectations of blogging for ICT4D.     

Why do women write personal blogs? Satisfying needs for self-disclosure and affiliation tell part of the story

Hierarchical OLS regression of survey results from a random sample of 312 women bloggers reveals a statistically significant positive relationship between need for self-disclosure and seeing blogging as a way to express one’s own voice, mediated by need for affiliation and time spent blogging. In essence, women with a strong need to self-disclose information about themselves are more likely than other women to say they blog to express their own voice in the blogosphere, compared with blogging to connect with other people or to gain influence in the blogosphere. In contrast, for women who blog to connect with other people or gain influence in the blogosphere, the strongest predictors is time spent blogging, not needs that motivated them to blog. Results are discussed in relation to need theory.     

Towards an analysis framework for investigating students' engagement and learning in educational blogs

Educational blogs are currently gaining in popularity in schools and higher education institutions, and they are widely promoted as collaborative tools supporting students' active learning. However, literature review on educational blogging revealed a lack of a complete and consistent framework for studying and assessing students' engagement and the impact of blogging on students' learning. This study reports on the application of an analysis framework for evaluating blogging learning activities, based on two well‐documented models, those of Community of Inquiry (CoI) and Social Network Analysis. The framework proposed is examined through an empirical study involving 21 K‐9 students, coming from two classes, in Greece. This investigation shed light into the different ways of students' engagement in a blog‐based project, namely their social and cognitive presence that supported the development of a CoI and learning. The results suggest that the students, through their different roles in the blog, achieved higher thinking and cognitive levels.     

Pattern of reflection in learning Authoring System through blogging

This research study aims to identify student's perceptions regarding the use of blogging, the pattern of reflection involved in learning Authoring System through blogging and student's performance in tests based on the reflection's pattern. Sixteen students who registered for the Authoring System subject participated in this study. It was conducted using quantitative approaches, through survey and pre-experimental design of one group post-test type. The instruments used were questionnaire, performance test and blog contents, where tutors and students posted messages and comments on the blog during the course. The results showed that the students' overall perception regarding the educational benefits of writing a blog and reading other students' blogs and comments was positive. Students also moderately agreed that they had difficulties in engaging in the reflection through blogging. It was also found that blogging indirectly improved the students' performance in the test. Through blog content analysis, the dominant type of reflection was monologue. However, the results from the data mining analysis showed that the students used reflective conversation and monologue type of reflection to achieve Grade A in learning Authoring System. It shows that students require deep and critical reflection to perform better in the subject.     

Using blogging to enhance the initiation of students into academic research

For the net-generation students learning in a Web 2.0 world, research is often equated with Googling and approached with a mindset accustomed to cut-and-paste practices. Recognizing educators’ concern over such students’ learning dispositions on the one hand, and the educational affordances of blogging on the other, this study examines the use of blogging to initiate students into academic research at the tertiary level. It focuses on the experiences of three students from a third-year music class working on their research paper with blog-based supervision provided by the teacher. The course, in a hybrid fashion, combined face-to-face lectures and tutorials with blog sharing and discussion. The students’ individually-owned blogs were specifically used as their research diaries in which they logged in their work in progress, they then received input from both the teacher and fellow students. Based on the researcher’s self-evaluation of the teaching-supervising process, an analysis of the students’ blog discourse, and students’ survey feedback, this article offers useful insights and suggestions for educators interested in either using or researching on blogging as a means to develop students’ research skills and understanding.     

Bloggers and Readers Blogging Together: Collaborative Co-creation of Political Blogs

A significant amount of research has focused on blogs, bloggers, and blogging. However, relatively little work has examined blog readers, their interactions with bloggers, or their impact on blogging. This paper presents a qualitative study focusing specifically on readers of political blogs to develop a better understanding of readers?? interactions with blogs and bloggers. This is the first such study to examine the same blogging activity from both readers?? and bloggers?? perspectives. Readers?? significance and contributions to blogs are examined through a number of themes, including: community membership and participation; the relationship between political ideology, reading habits, and political participation; and differences and similarities between mainstream media (MSM) and blogs. Based on these analyses, this paper argues that blogging is not only a social activity, but is a collaborative process of co-creation in which both bloggers and readers engage. Implications of this finding contribute to the study and understanding of reader participation, to the design of technologies for bloggers and blog readers, and to the development of theoretical understandings of social media.     

Multimedia blogging in physical education: Effects on student knowledge and ICT self-efficacy

The main idea behind this study was to explore the educational potential of multimedia blogging for academic disciplines such as Physical Education (PE) that are not heavily based on written discourse and where multiple representations are important in learning. A class blog was utilized as a means for PE students to reflect on and showcase their performances of four specific basketball skills, through creating multimedia posts on these skills and receiving comments from their instructors, peers and an external expert. The effectiveness of multimedia blogging was evaluated, in terms of the acquisition of knowledge of the specific basketball skills and the self-efficacy in Information and Communication Technologies (ICT), as compared to that of an equivalent multimedia website which lacked the blogging component. Students’ responses to the blogging activity were also investigated. The sample were 70 undergraduate PE students who were assigned to two groups, one of which used the class blog (Group A, N = 35) and the other one the website (Group B, N = 35), both for 11 weeks. The study followed a pretest/posttest experimental design, taking before and after measurements of each group through written questionnaires. Participation in the blogging activity did have a positive impact on students’ ICT self-efficacy, given that Group A students exhibited significant gains in Internet self-efficacy as well as in multimedia processing and blogging self-efficacy, whereas those of Group B did not. Students’ responses to the blogging activity were also positive. However, within both groups no significant increase was found in students’ knowledge of the basketball skills. The implications of the findings for higher education and future research are discussed.     

Acceptance of blog usage: The roles of technology acceptance,social influence and knowledge sharing motivation

Recently, there has been a dramatic proliferation in the number of blogs; however, little is published about what motivates people to participate in blog activities. Based on the theory of reasoned action, we developed a model involving technology acceptance, knowledge sharing and social influences. A survey of 212 blog participants found strong support for the model. The results indicated that ease of use and enjoyment, and knowledge sharing (altruism and reputation) were positively related to attitude toward blogging, and accounted for 78% of the variance. On the other hand, social factors (community identification) and attitude toward blogging significantly influenced a blog participant's intention to continue to use blogs. Together they explain 83% of the variance of intention to blog.     

Bloggers’ Responses to the Snowden Affair: Combining Automated and Manual Methods in the Analysis of News Blogging

The Snowden affair gave rise to a huge public debate about not only the legitimacy of the secret surveillance programs he revealed but also about Snowden himself and about the accuracy of the information he leaked. In this paper we present an analysis of how the affair was discussed in the English language blogosphere, based on a corpus of 15,000 blog posts written about Snowden and published from June 2013 to June 2014, as a sub-corpus of a larger corpus of 100,000 blog posts on the topic of surveillance, written during the period 2006–2014. Automated tools are used to identify the topics that characterize the blogging about surveillance and the posts about the Snowden affair. Through an in-depth analysis of the blog posts that commented on Snowden’s revelations of the PRISM program for surveillance of social media users, we chart how bloggers responded to Snowden and his role in this disclosure, whether they found the information credible, and the extent to which they expressed criticism of the surveillance practices. The analysis is used as a basis for discussing the role of blogs in the civic engagement during the first phase of the Snowden affair.     

An empirically grounded framework to guide blogging in higher education

Abstract   We report on a study involving Masters-level students who blogged as a part of a distance-learning course at the Open University, UK. We present an empirically-grounded framework that can be used to guide educators when they are considering blogging as part of their courses, and can be used by students' whose courses include blogging activities. In our analysis of semi-structured interviews with students, we identified six factors that influenced their blogging: perceptions of, and need for, an audience; perceptions of, and need for, community; the utility of, and need for comments; presentational style of the blog content; overarching factors related to the technological context; and the pedagogical context of the course. The students' blogging behaviours were varied and depended upon the way in which they addressed each of the six factors. These factors, along with the associated questions in the proposed framework, provide insights about the activity of blogging from a student's perspective. Therefore, the framework can guide the design of blogging activities in courses.     

What would it mean to blog on the semantic web?

The phenomenon known as Web logging (“blogging”) has helped realize an initial goal of the Web: to turn Web content consumers (i.e., end users) into Web content producers. As the Semantic Web unfolds, we feel there are two questions worth posing: (1) do blog entries have semantic structure that can be usefully captured and exploited? (2) Is blogging a natural way to encourage growth of the Semantic Web? We explore empirical evidence for answering these questions in the affirmative and propose means to bring blogging into the mainstream of the Semantic Web, including ontologies that extend the RSS 1.0 specification and an XSL transform for handling RSS 0.9x/2.0 files. To demonstrate the validity of our approach we have constructed a semantic blogging environment based on Haystack. We argue that with tools such as Haystack, semantic blogging will be an important paradigm by which metadata authoring will occur in the future.     

Does Blogging Empower Women? Exploring the Role of Agency and Community

Two studies explored the relationship between blogging and psychological empowerment among women. First, a survey (N = 340) revealed that personal journaling empowers users by inducing a strong sense of community whereas filter blogging does so by enhancing their sense of agency. Various user motivations were also shown to predict psychological empowerment. Next, a 2 (type of blog) X 2 (comments) X 2 (site visits) factorial experiment (N = 214) found that 2 site metrics—the number of site visits and number of comments—affect psychological empowerment through distinct mechanisms—the former through the sense of agency and the latter through the sense of community. These metrics are differentially motivating for bloggers depending on the type of blog maintained: filter or personal.     

Gender Differences in British Blogging

This article asks whether blogging in the United Kingdom, which started later than in the United States, reproduces the gender differences in blogging behavior and the gender inequalities in recognition that have been observed in studies based largely on U.S. bloggers. A sample of 48 female and male British bloggers answered a questionnaire about their blogging practices and attitudes; data were also collected from their blogs and by means of online tools. For both sexes, blogging is mainly a leisure activity, and men and women find the same range of satisfactions in blogging. However, more women use blogging as an outlet for creative work, whether as a hobby or as a livelihood. The results support several reasons advanced in previous research for the lower public profile of women bloggers.     

Blogging privacy rule orientations,privacy management,and content deletion practices: The variability of online privacy management activity at different stages of social media use

The purpose of this study was to examine social media users’ blogging privacy rule orientations, privacy management regulation, and content deletion practices as distinct types of activity occurring at different stages of the blogging process (before, during, and after blogging) that may aid in understanding the functioning of blogging disclosure activity overall. The study was guided by a complementary application of both the uses and gratifications perspective and communication privacy management (CPM) theory. A central tenet of both theories suggests that people are variably active in their communication behavior. We identified five discrete blogger privacy rule orientations explaining different online choice-making practices: the self-centric, the utilitarian, the planner, the protector, and the unworried orientations toward blogging. We also identified six different motives for deleting previously-posted information: conflict management, protection of personal identity/safety, fear of retribution, employment security, impression management, emotional regulation, and relational cleansing. Path analysis revealed several direct and indirect paths among bloggers’ motives for deleting previously posted material and their level of disinhibition, blogging privacy rule orientations, amount of time blogging, and privacy management practices. As use of social media increases, exploring variations in privacy management regulation practices is critical.     

Creating an educational context for Open Source Intelligence: The development of Internet self-efficacy through a blogcentric course

This paper examined the effects of a blogging centered curriculum on the development of Internet self-efficacy of students taking a general education class. The class used a hybrid model (in class and online) that both integrated and strongly encouraged blogging on a community style, open source blog. The curriculum was designed to both create a more distributed educational structure and to develop greater autonomy and participation in student activity. It was hypothesized that as students engaged in increasingly complex Internet activities they would develop greater strength in Internet self-efficacy in organization and differentiation of information and reaction to and generation of information. 367 undergraduate students participated in the current study. A pre-, post-test format was used to measure whether there were significant changes in strength of Internet self-efficacy, with the inclusion of a control group of a more traditionally-structured class. The results showed that a blogcentric course has impacts on the increases in students' Internet self-efficacy, particularly for reactive/generative self-efficacy. The findings are discussed in light of potential implications on the future direction of education.     

Using blogs to support learning during internship

Blogging has been recommended as a suitable tool for learning during internship due to its associated usefulness in collaborative learning, reflection, communication, and social support. In this study, blogging was incorporated into the internship activities of two discipline-specific groups of interns: information management (n = 53) and nursing (n = 28). In examining the behavior, perceptions and processes of blogging among interns from the two disciplines, a mixed-methods design was used to obtain quantitative and qualitative data through structured interviews and blogging entries. Results revealed that the interns engaged regularly in the writing and reading of their own blogs, and commented on others’ blog-writing. The interns perceived blogs to be useful during internship in providing an avenue for knowledge construction, problem solving, reflection, and communicating their emotions. Positive perceptions were not influenced by discipline background, frequency of use, or blogging platform. Qualitative analyses of blog contents indicated that the students engaged in cognitive, metacognitive-reflective, affective, and social-collaborative learning processes in blogging. Higher engagement was found in cognitive and metacognitive processes. Responses to open-ended probes suggest that pedagogical factors (e.g., grading system, supervision) may also have influenced students’ blogging behaviors and perceptions. Overall, this study offers evidence to support the use of blogging during internship as computer-based support for learning.     

(Russian) Writer‐Bloggers: Digital Perfection and the Aesthetics of Imperfection

This article explores readings of (micro)blogging services as outlets for playful, “imperfect” language. Adopting a transcultural approach, it examines a blog category that has attracted scarce academic attention to date: the creative worker's blog. Through a qualitative analysis of metalinguistic statements by 14 Russian writer‐bloggers, the author tests 2 interdependent hypotheses: (H1) through metalinguistic statements and pragmatic strategies, writers present language play and “imperfect” language as prototypical for new media; and (H2) If H1 is correct, the writer‐blogger's preference for “imperfect” language caters into a broader cultural‐philosophical anxiety – one of foregrounding imperfection as an aesthetic counterresponse to digital perfection.